Driving for dollars doesn’t always have to be a physical endeavor. In this day and age, technology allows us to do everything virtually, including finding self-storage facilities to buy. Crexi is a commercial real estate market website that has a wide variety of listings for self-storage facilities. With Crexi, you can find self-storage facilities for sale in all sorts of locations, from major metropolitan areas to rural communities. In this episode, we dive into how to use Crexi to find self-storage facilities to buy. Tune in and learn how you can leverage this powerful tool to take your self-storage business to the next level!
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How To Use Crexi To Find Self-Storage Facilities To Buy
Let Grant come in. Grant is from Crexi. I have been working with Grant for several years. We use Crexi to find facilities to purchase and he’s going to show you how we do that so we don’t go the way that everybody knows to go and see facilities for sale. Remember, we go directly to the owners, so we use Crexi in that sense. Also, there are 1,000 other ways that you can use Crexi. He’s going to get into how to utilize Crexi to the best of your advantage to be able to find facilities to buy. I appreciate you guys here. Typically, I teach, but Grant’s going to be talking for this episode. Let me switch him over.
I appreciate everyone joining us to learn about Crexi. For those who aren’t familiar with us as a company in general, we’ve been around since 2015 as a marketplace for commercial real estate. We launched as an accessible way for anyone to go look for deals, whether it’s land, storage, or any sort of commercial property to purchase, and to connect with brokers as well who put their inventory up with Crexi.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve become the largest marketplace if you’re looking at total listings in commercial real estate. With that, growth has come a lot more of the data and investment resources that we’re going to run through in this episode. That can be broken down into three main categories. One, we want to help investors analyze any market. What’s happening in terms of the comps in the area? What financing are people getting on properties? There’s site selection. What are the demographics of the neighborhoods you’re looking at? Where are the population and income levels along with traffic for the area?
Lastly, what Stacy covered as well is going to be our going direct-to-owner and finding off-market opportunities. I know that’s what a lot of people will want to focus on. It is, “How do I go find storage facilities that might not be listed but go directly to the owner and maybe find some likely sellers that way?” We’re going to cover it all in this episode.
In our marketplace, if I go into For Sale, I can see everything that’s actively listed on Crexi throughout the country. We are nationwide, so we cover every market. I can then go into my asset type. We’re focused on storage. You’ll see everything that’s listed on Crexi. If I want more information on any one of these properties or I’m interested in one, I can click directly on that listing. I have an example that is in Colorado. We can go to the property, see when this was listed, how long has it been on the market, and all the details that were listed with it like the asking price and the broker details. All of that will be available on our listing side.
One cool thing about when you have access to the data side of Crexi and what investors use is that it doesn’t end with looking at the listing. I could go in and I have copied this address. We’ve got a full sales comp side of Crexi. I could go see what’s the actual history behind this property and whether this is something that I want more information on. This is an interesting property. It hasn’t transacted back since 1991.
This is what a comp on Crexi will look like. We have the history of the property. We will show you the last time it was transacted. It only sold for $446,000. That’s what happens when you hold a storage facility for 30 years. You can see the owner of the property along with that contact information. This is a huge part of what we’re going to go through not just on a listed property or a comp but on any storage facility where we can show you who is the true owner of that and how you could get in touch with them as well.
Moving into a little bit on the analysis front, let’s say we were looking in Tennessee for a storage facility, I can type in a location on the top corner. Instead of going through and seeing what the market is like, I’ll have this Insights tab that’s going to tell me what the averages are as far as self-storage in that market. You’ll be able to see on the asking side our median price. It is $1.94 million. This is throughout the state. You will see our price per foot, our cap rate trends, both in terms of what’s being asked and what’s transacting, a median year built on those storage facilities, and how long they are staying available on the market.
This is always a quick way to break down any given area and give you a feel of what’s happening and what’s transacting. You can do this with any specific location. I have the whole state, but I could un-boundary this. I could go into a ZIP Code, a neighborhood, or wherever you want to analyze. The next side of this is being able to hit the dropdown on the top left and move into the sales comps. I saw what was actively listed, and then I want to see what’s transacting and I want to know who owns all of the facilities throughout Tennessee.
Off the bat, you will see the property name or address. We have this sorted to self-storage. You have your date sold. You can see ones that have even transacted from January 2024 through December 2023 or the end of last year. You can go into any one of these facilities to see what happened with the sale and who is the owner of that property.
To go into what a couple of other comps will look like in general, I have some examples. There is a storage facility in California. If it was one that was ever listed on Crexi, we’re going to be able to show you everything that was on that offering memorandum, those would be some details on the rent, and everything that was listed with the property along with the closing transaction, what were the cap rate, the NOI, and price per foot. The owners of those properties will be listed below there as well.
To give us a scope of some different deal sizes, there is a facility in Texas. The history of this property is it is a 31-unit. I like to be able to see all of the pictures around this. This is an older property. It was built in 1969. This one only transacted back in October 2020 and sold for $375,000. You can see what the cap rate was on this facility. You have all the information that was listed with it, the broker, as well as the actual owner. If this was ever a property you were interested in getting in touch with the entity, you have the skip trace owner with contact information on that property as well.
Lastly, I have one more comp example before I tell you about how to get into finding owners in a really efficient way and exporting some of that information. This is one more that was in California as well. You can see all of the details on this one. This was a bit of a newer facility renovated in 2004. There is a higher price tag on this one. It was sold in summer 2023. You can see the owner with that owner information along with the portfolio link. This is one other thing that I wanted to cover that we’ll have on every property. You can link the sale comp or the property record to a portfolio.
I know that the LLC that owns this property, we have 78 other parcels throughout the country associated with that LLC. It looks like a good mix of industrial and storage that they own. You can click through any parcel to see the other properties that they own and what they paid for those along with the mortgage they have on those properties as well. It gives you a really good idea of who owns what and whether there is an opportunity outside of one property with a specific owner.
There are a couple of different ways that we can find likely sellers. One, we do have the owner’s information on all of these storage facilities. Off the bat, if there’s one that fits your price range, then you can go in and you could contact the owner that way. The other way that we have people who want to find more likely sellers is by reaching out to older-owned properties.
If I double-click the Date Sold, that is going to take us back to some of the longest-owned properties on Crexi for storage facilities. We go all the way back to the ‘90s. I’ve seen some back in the ‘70s and ‘80s even. That means this owner has owned the storage facility for over 25 to 30-plus years. There may be some value-added opportunity or maybe an owner could be more willing to do a conversation about parting ways with that property.
The other way aside from sorting by length of ownership would be with financing. We track loan data on Crexi. If you click the Filter tab, you’ll see the maturity date as its own filter on the platform. I could go in. If I want to look out for owners that have a loan coming due, let’s say, over the next year or two years, I can show comps after putting in the maturity date.
On the loan information on the right-hand side, we know exactly how much they executed a loan for and the exact date that it comes through. Oftentimes, we’ll have even the interest rate that they originally got their loan at. We’ll have the owners on the right-hand side. This is a really good way to look at some of these interest rates that were a bit lower back in 2018 to 2020 and even 2022 with short-term debt that is coming due over the next year or two. You might have an opportunity to reach out to the owner and see if they’re willing to sell.
We can go through each one of these properties. You can always click in and see the details of the last time it was sold. There is a good example from 2021 of a facility here in Tennessee. You can see what that transacted for in the past as well as the owner. We’ll skip trace through that owner for you. You can see the full history of that property.
You can see how much self-storage has appreciated. Back in 2007, this sold for only $205,000 before they did some work to it. You can see that purchased in 2021 for $2.5 million. They put a $1.875 million loan on that. It was only a three-year term so that will come due at the end of 2024. We can even see the lender they used, the type of loan that they got, and the low interest rate that they executed at that time. That is something to monitor with a seller there that you could stay in touch with and see where they’re at with a property like that.
If you want to not have to go through each one of these properties one by one, you want to get a list of owners to reach out to, for example. You can select all the checkboxes on the left-hand side. We can export owners to a spreadsheet. When we do that, it will populate onto your computer in an Excel format. You’re going to have four tabs at the bottom. One is an inventory report which is going to show you the last time the property was sold. You can sort it by the square footage or the sold price. You’re going to be able to see if it’s in an opportunity zone or not, the owner with mailing addresses, year built, and zoning on the far right as well. The first tab is understanding the property and what it’s last sold for.
We’re also going to have a tab that’s strictly for owners. This is where you have your contact information. I know a lot of times when Stacy is looking for deals or her team, they’re using this to find the owner’s contact and how they can get in touch with them directly. We’ll show you the owner entity on the far left and the contact name. You’ll then have a column for the best phone number to reach them at along with emails on the far right.
Lastly, you’ll have a Financing tab. You’re going to be able to see which lenders were used on these transactions for the loans. We have the interest rates. You’ll be able to see those on the far right. You’ll be able to see the term that was executed. A lot of these short-term loans are 3, 4, or 5 years that are coming due over the next year or two.
You can see the type of loan they executed, the amount, and the execution date on that loan originally as well. All of this, you can sort through. If you want the ones that are coming due, you can select them. If you want to see the most active lenders in the area, you can sort by lender and see First Citizens Bank, for example, or Glenville Bank. You will be able to see some of the more active lenders in an area. This is really helpful even to look at more recent transactions and see who is funding these deals and what terms they’re giving out in real-time as well.
A couple of other things I wanted to get into on the mapping side of Crexi is, one, when you go into a specific area, we want you to understand the demographics around any neighborhood to help you with that site selection aspect. Let’s do Nashville as an example. There is a report on storage comps. You can narrow this down by a timeline if you want more recent comps there and to see what the average cap rate and price have been.
We want you to understand the demographics around any neighborhood to help you with site selection. Click To TweetWe also want you to be able to understand within a property what are your demographics. If I was looking at something over in Berry Hill in South Nashville, I could draw either with my pencil or with a circle and understand what are the demographics within two and a half miles of the property that I’m analyzing. I know based on this report my population for that area along with the population growth, the income within that two miles, the income growth rate, and the age demographics.
All of this is broken down so you can see the exact number in the pie chart. You will also know based on the report the top employment, housing occupancy, and the renter-to-homeowner ratio as well. All of this information is available to help you understand the market you’re in, not only the numbers but also the demographics.
You are able to use the interactive maps at the top as well. If you want to quickly analyze some different cities and you are a more visual person as far as looking at these deals, you can put in population, for example. This is going to break down where the density lies within the market you’re looking at. The darker the red, the more densely populated that area is. This is by census tracts. That’s within these neighborhoods. I can click in and see exactly how many people make up these areas. The more dense areas that you’re looking at, the more people that might need storage or the more renters within that area.
When you zoom out, you’ll go by ZIP Code. You can even see the dark red has almost 100,000 people in this ZIP Code versus a lighter color, which is only about a quarter of that. There are 25,000 people located in this market. It is the same thing I mentioned with the income. This tells you where the highest versus lowest-earning income is. The green is going to be our highest, which is over $100,000. The lighter or blue colors will be the lower income about half in that area.
For storage specifically, a really good way to map out how much exposure your property is going to get is in the traffic counts. Under the traffic data, I can see all the dots that represent how many vehicles are going to pass by that point per day. If you’re looking at a property off the highway, I can click on the closest dot and see that’s a very high-exposure property and has over 140,000 vehicles passing by per day. You can click on any specific dot you want to go into. If you even want to edit a range, you can put in a minimum number that you are comfortable seeing. Whether it’s $10,000 or $20,000, you can apply that so the dots will update to only show you the properties that fit your criteria there.
One of the last searches is our parcel coverage. I want to note this because you are not limited to only you know the comps on Crexi or the listings. You can go in and pull the information on any property in the country. You can do this by zooming into the screen or typing in an address, and then you’ll see these parcels outlined. We have this for every residential, commercial, and piece of land.
All you have to do is click in and you’ll see View Property Record. That’s how we get into our parcel coverage. We’re always going to show you a satellite view. I can see the zoning on my property I clicked into in the square footage. I know this is a storage facility. If I wanted to understand or even prospect around this, I could click into any other property around it to see who owns those and all the details there. I can scroll down on this lot to see the details on the actual parcel versus the building on it.
We always will have that transaction history on the parcel as well so that you can see the last time it was sold. This storage facility, for example, last sold in May 2023 for $5.2 million. We even know the last mortgage on that. They had a $4.16 million loan. You can see the bank they used and the interest rate they got that loan. It is the same thing as the comps. We want you to be able to go into any property and see not only the company or the entity that bought that but also the contact in case you want to get in touch with them and the mailing address for them as well.
One thing to note here is if anyone is local to the markets that they are looking to invest in, all of this is available on our mobile app. For each parcel that is outlined, if you have the Crexi app, you’ll be able to do this on the go. I use it even when walking around different neighborhoods. It will take you to the parcel that you’re closest to and will show you all the same information. You can call directly from the Crexi app as well. I know Stacy talks about driving for dollars. If you’re local to a market you’re looking in, all of this can be used at your fingertips on the phone as well.
I’m going to pause there if anyone has questions or, Stacy, if you have anything else for me to cover. I know I saw Matt in the chat asking if this was all free or part of the membership. This is all part of the membership side of Crexi. It’s called Crexiintelligence. That is what unlocks access to all of the data that we ran through. Crexi as a marketplace is completely free to use. That is where you can look into listings. If anyone wants to go on Crexi.com, start looking at what’s available for sale in the market. That’s free to every user and every investor. Once you want to click into the sales comps, get the insights, or go into the property owners, that’s all part of the membership portion of the platform.
Does anybody else have any questions for Grant on Crexi? He went fast so let us know. We use Crexi internally to skip trace owners. That’s one of the bigger things that we do. When we’re virtually driving for storage, we use Crexi to virtually drive for storage. We’ll then click on the property and it will pull up the owner’s information. We’ll call the owner directly right from that information. That’s what we’re doing. We virtually drive for storage inside of Crexi. That’s one of the biggest things for us.
There are a couple of things that we do, but the second thing is that we pull the list of the facilities in the area. If I have one of my virtual assistants calling in a certain area, we come to Crexi and pull up all the storage facilities that are on the list. You have all the contact information. You have everything there so you call them. You can create your own list of properties of any type of property from Crexi. Eric was asking if it’s not on the market. If it’s not on the market, you can still find it. All the information is there. Tell them how to do that. How do you find the off-market stuff?
You can create your own list of properties from Crexi. Click To TweetI talked about the Sales Comps tab. That’s so you can see every storage facility. We also have the Properties tab. That’s if you want to see all of the storage facilities within a certain area. You can always switch to this and start to click through. This is a really easy way to build up a list. For anything that’s zone storage, you’ll be able to click through each one of these properties within a market.
You can go back to the map view and see where these parcels are located or you can do what we showed before. You can export these properties with the contacts so that you know all the details in a spreadsheet view for the storage facilities within an area as well. You’ll see the property type of storage. It will show you all the owner’s mailing addresses and what the property last sold for. That contact information will be in the spreadsheet as well.
There are so many different ways for you to be able to communicate with the owner. You can call the owner. You can email the owner. You can send the owner a letter directly to their address or even to the facility’s address. There’s a numerous number of ways of being able to contact the owner. Instead of manually creating the list yourself, figure out the area that you want to be in, pull up the list, and then make sure that you’re contacting the owner in the eight different ways that you can contact the owner.
One of the biggest things about that, too, is not only does this make it easy to really hone in on where you want to be, but you can also have more information going into that call to the owner. You’re not going in blind. You’re going in saying, “I know exactly what they’ve paid for it in the past. I know if they have a loan on the property. I even know if they own a portfolio of different properties as well.” It makes that first step a little easier when you’re not going in blind and wondering about what numbers you might be quoting.
To Stacy’s point about getting targeted, if you want to pick a ZIP Code or a neighborhood, that’s why we have this Boundaries tab. It is so that you can draw your outline of where you want to focus or use this radius to say, “I’m going to find all the storage facilities within three miles that I’ve been interested in this market.” It is like, “I’ve got 573 storage facilities in this area that I can go in, see the owners, and get specific for what I’m targeting.”
Elisa has a really good question. How does seller financing show up?
We give you the loan information. That would be the best weapon for you to go into a call and know exactly what the seller has on their loan and the terms on it. It’s not exactly going to have a filter that shows you seller financing or that they’re open to it, but you’ll know all the details going into the call so that you can see if you think they would be open to that seller financing as well.
Go into one of them too. Somebody else asked, “What are all the demographics that you give?” The thing with Crexi is everything that you need to know about the property is right there. It has everything.
There is one here in Nashville. This was a facility that was sold back in November 2023. You’re going to be able to see all the details of the actual building. This was 22,000 square feet. It was built in 1959. We’ll have that sale price of what they bought it for with the owner. You’ll scroll down to see the full history. This is a really interesting one. It sold in 2021 for $3.38 million. They added a mortgage to that which was a construction loan and then sold it again for $6.5 million. They were building on that and flipping the property over a two-year period.
Yo the point on the demographics, any property you click into on Crexi, if you scroll down on the right-hand side, we are going to do the work for you on the demographics within a 1, 3, or 5-mile radius. Starting with 1, I can click into 3 if I want to analyze that. It has the population, the growth, the income of that neighborhood around it, the age demographics, and employment. What is important for storage, and I know multifamily too, is having a renter-to-homeowner ratio so you know exactly how many renters are in that area versus homeowners as well. We have that exact number.
The one thing I love about Crexi, honestly, is you can go to any random property that’s not popping up. It gives you all the information about any property. You could be like, “My neighbor’s property, I want to know all their information.”
Any parcel record that you want to zoom in and click into now.
Every property in the country is on this map and all the information about that property is on this map. Crexi is not for storage. Crexi is every property out there. That is what it is. Anybody can come and use a multifamily, residential, or land. Anything is there. A couple of people asked how to get a hold of you. Tell everybody what your email address is.
If anyone wants to get in touch, my email is GDirector@Crexi.com. My full name is Grant Director. I’m happy to answer any questions. I know a lot of people like to see what it looks like in their market or tailor a search. We’re always happy to do that for you.
He gives a Stacy discount so make sure you tell him that you heard him from Stacy. He’ll work with you to come up with a good price that you guys can get this for. Honestly, the truth is all you need is this to do any type of real estate investing. You could pull up the information right here.
We have all kinds of investors in every asset class and even people looking for raw land to build on. I know that’s been popular even for storage investors and developers. This Properties tab is powerful because you can go in and search for any characteristic of a parcel you’re looking for, whether that’s zoning or raw land. You really can filter down to exactly the type of property that you want to see.
I’ve had you come and talk to the group a gazillion times in the last couple of years. Every time you do the Crexi demo, I’m like, “I forgot about that. I got to do that too.”
That’s part of it too. We’re getting a lot of feedback from our investors and people like yourself that are using this. Every few months when we do these updates, it’s fun because there’s typically a lot of new stuff that we’ve added that’s helpful.
It is really cool because they do listen to what we need. Michael’s asking, “How much competition is out there? I’m in Nashville. Is there any spot that’s still available? I’m sure you guys have contacted every owner within 50 miles.” Michael, I’m going to tell you something about investing in real estate. I’ve called every storage facility in the country and talked to almost every single one and so have a lot of other people.
The truth of the matter is that it’s all about timing. People are always buying and selling their deals. You cannot think in your mind, “Is there a deal out there?” If you’re thinking that, then you’re never going to find something. What you have to do is you have to get out there and look for a storage facility or whatever kind of property that you want and talk to the owners or even talk to realtors. The truth is it’s 20% getting out there and looking and 80% timing. That’s it.
We go back and follow up with owners over and over again. We’ve contacted them ten times, and on the 11th time, they want to sell. Timing is what it is. Do not think about competition. There is enough to go around for everybody. You have to do the work. That is what you have to do. Eric is asking. “Can we see competition in the area? Can we look at other storage facilities rates or anything like that?” Crexi is more of a property report card. Crexi is not like where you’re going to be able to pull up competition rates and stuff.
Not yet. We are working on rental rates. We’ll have some of that. I talked about a property earlier that we hosted the transaction, which is happening more on these. We did have insight into the cap rates and what the rents were for that property. It’s not like a full report yet, but you can always go in, see everything that’s actively available in that area for storage, and compare it with all of the facilities there as well.
He’s talking in terms of how you can compare the comps of one storage facility to another, but the truth is he’s talking about competition as unit competition. They don’t get into unit rates and things like that, Eric. The best way to figure out competition unit rates is to look at their website. The best way is to call the competition and ask them, “What are your rates for 5×10 and 10×10?” They’re not going to pull that up.
The truth is, Eric, when you think of competition in the storage world, there are four different prices. There’s your standard rate, website rate, the rate when you call in, and then also your SpareFoot rate. There might even be a Google ads rate. There’s a whole bunch of different rates. You have to know that there’s no one software that will ever be able to have your competition rates. The best way for you to know what competition is charging is to call them up and ask them. There was another question. Someone asked, “On the contact information, what if the name of an LLC or trust and the owner registered in the state where the contact info is undisclosed? Will the phone numbers and contact names come up?”
We skip trace through. It doesn’t matter which state. We work in all non-disclosure states too. We’ll always be able to skip trace through that company or LLC that it’s in. That’s part of the third-party providers that Crexi has integrated with us. That’s not a problem with getting through an LLC or an entity to get to that information.
Remember. You’re going to have the addresses of the owner, the address of the facility, the facility’s phone number, and a gazillion facilities from the owner. From the facility, you’re going to have email addresses. You’re going to have a plethora of ways of getting ahold of the owner. You can’t be like, “I’ll call them right now.” You have to do all of the ways to get a hold of somebody. We do all the ways. Someone asked, “Are there properties that have no internet presence or Google listing also?” Yes. Every property in the country.
Exactly. That’s been the biggest thing with our Properties tabs. We have every single parcel in the country mapped out. As long as it’s labeled storage with a county or with any record that we’re pulling through, then you’ll be able to see that under searching for storage and your types for properties or comps. It doesn’t have to be listed on Google. We do track those, but it’s for every parcel record that will have the information on them.
Every property in the country is all there for you. Someone asked, “Would you be able to show what listings look like in Wyoming or the list of ownership info in Wyoming?” Eric wants to buy something in Wyoming. Wyoming is a good spot because nobody thinks of Wyoming. It’s a state that everybody forgets so it’s a very good spot to be looking in.
If you want to look, there are two ways. We can look at what’s for sale in Wyoming. We’ll have our active listings. We can switch over and go into our properties or sales comps. It will look very similar to what we looked at in other states. You can click into a record. This is an industrial property, but to have an example, there is one that sold at the beginning of 2024. You’ll be able to skip trace through the owner of any property there as well.
I’ve been doing this for a long time. There are a lot of storage facilities on Crexi for sale. There are a lot of properties. You can always go onto Crexi and look at the properties. A lot of times too, you want to check industrial. You want to check commercials sometimes. Sometimes, they’re not classified correctly. The broker didn’t put it in the right spot. I see that as well.
Get into the industrial section and see if there, by chance, happens to be a storage facility. Maybe it has commercial space and then also some storage as well so they’re like, “What do I classify this as? I’ll put it in commercial.” That happens quite often as well. You could always check commercial and industrial here.
100%. That’s the most common one I see where they’ll get listed as the subtype industrial. If the county doesn’t capture it as storage, you still might have some opportunity to find that there, for sure.
His email is GDirector@Crexi.com. Make sure that you tell him that you knew about him from me. I highly recommend this. This is the backbone of our acquisitions team. This is what they use for us to find properties. They’re virtually driving for storage and utilizing Crexi and all the information on Crexi. We take all the information from Crexi, put it into the Google Drive folder or whatever folder that we use, and then share that with our buyers. That is what we do. That’s good. Contact Grant. That’s it. Grant, I appreciate you hopping on.
I appreciate you having me back on. I’ll look forward to next time. Thanks for everything.
Thank you to everybody as well. We’ll see you guys next time. Take care.
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